Sun, Oct 22, 2006:
Toilets are seeming more important than ever with the discovery that several people in the family have been diagnosed with typhoid. Typhoid is generally transmitted by the fecal/oral pathway, so I'll leave it to you to imagine how four of our household might have gotten it. Anna, Thad, and I have been inoculated, but the inoculations are only on the order of 50% to 80% effective -- so we're not assured of anything.
Now the test for typhoid that they use in the clinic here is not particularly sensitive, and can lead to false positives. Only one person in the house had the fever which is symptomatic of typhoid. That's the good news. The bad news is that the fever could also be symptomatic of malaria.
Hand-washing is on the front line of defense against typhoid, as you can well imagine. Another step we've implemented is that dishes are now being washed in chlorinated water. We've been drinking boiled water since our arrival: boiling is about the surest way to treat water (heavy metals like lead aside). One of the reasons that we're taking so many precautions with our water is that there's plenty of bacteria in it: I've used a water testing kit that my brother Steve provided to discover that. We need to be concerned about the ground-level fecal deposition that goes on here (whether human or animal), since our water comes partly from a mountain stream....